Showing results by narrator "Laurel Lefkow" in All Categories

‘Wilder artfully cranks up the tension, so you don't quite know when you begin to hold your breath. A chilling read’ - Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, The Serial Killer. A mother moves to Geneva with her husband and their two young children. In their beautiful new rented apartment...

In 1955 New York City is full of post-war euphoria and glamour, and the Barbizon Hotel - the place where Grace Kelly lived when she first came to the big city - is where young women from good families stay while they launch their careers and wait for Mr Right to come calling with a dozen roses and a date night at El Morocco.

Set in modern-day America and France, Renaissance Italy and Boxer Rebellion China, these stories embrace whole lifetimes, much in the manner of Alice Munro and William Trevor. Joan Silber skilfully and subtly ties one story to the next, as a minor element in one becomes a major element in the next, until the last is tied convincingly to the first. Intense in subject yet restrained in tone, they are about longings—often held for years—and the ways in which sex and religion can become parallel forms of dedication and comfort.

WILL SELF is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language. In this brilliantly conceived new novel Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine. Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: is this … it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril.

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation. From its transatlantic roots it has absorbed the sons and daughters of other cultures, other lands and made them part of her own. Within this melting pot of styles, genres and wordplay one fact stands out: In the American short story, literary tradition has a strong, vibrant and almost inclusive history, if you know where to look.

The Shadows Between Us meets The Scorpio Races in the epic conclusion to NYT bestselling Kalyn Josephson's This Dark Descent, called "a fierce and darkly magical thrill ride" by acclaimed author Ava Reid. This program features multicast narration. The Illinir may be over, but the race for...

Five families. Perfect from the outside. Broken on the inside.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Fighter for Justice shows young listeners how the former First Lady evolved from a poor little rich girl to a protector and advocate for those without a voice. Although now seen as a cultural icon, she was a woman deeply insecure about her looks and her role in the world. But by recognizing her fears and constantly striving to overcome her prejudices, she used her proximity to presidents and her own power to aid in the fight for Civil Rights and other important causes. This biography gives listeners a fresh perspective on her extraordinary life. 

Joanna Smith Rakoff's richly drawn and immensely satisfying first novel details the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates whose ambitions and friendships threaten to unravel as they chase their dreams, shed their youth, and build their lives in Brooklyn during the late 1990s and the turn of the 21st century.

In 2006, Julia Lerner is recruited by Russia's largest intelligence agency. By 2018, she's in Silicon Valley as COO of Tangerine, one of America's most famous technology companies. She funnels intelligence back to the motherland, but now Russia's asking for more, and Julia's getting nervous. Alice Lu is a first generation Chinese American whose parents are delighted she's working at Tangerine. One afternoon, while performing a server check, Alice discovers some unusual activity, and now she's burdened with two suspicions.

Eleanor Merritt, a do-gooding American family-planning worker, was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. Unnervingly, she finds herself falling in love with the beguiling Calvin Piper despite, or perhaps because of, his misanthropic theories about population control and the future of the human race. Surely, Calvin whispers seductively in Eleanor's ear, if the poor are a responsibility, they are also an imposition.

The Grelliers and the Schapens: two families who have been farming in the Kaw River Valley for over 150 years, their lives connected through the generations by history and geography. Then Gina Haring, bringing with her the liberal air of the big city, moves into a dilapidated house near both farms. Gina has secrets, her own reasons for being in the Kansas countryside, and they're not necessarily what the people around her imagine.

The ballad is one of the oldest poetic forms in English and are simply poems or songs that tell a story. Maybe it’s because of childhood associations or that we all enjoy a cracking good story told in rhyme but as this volume demonstrates, the ballad has endless appeal. We include favourites such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee as well as classics such as Sir Patrick Spens, the Ballad of Reading Gaol by Wilde and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats.

First published in 1906, The Four Million consists of twenty-five moving short stories based in New York. Each tale showcases the lives of seemingly ordinary people – clerks, waiters, con artists and more – with irony, humour and warmth. From a charming exploration of love with 'The Gift of the Magi' to a tragic tale of friendship in 'After Twenty Years', The Four Million compellingly conveys the unique breadth of the human experience. A brilliant collection of character sketches, O. Henry reminds us how everyone has a story worth telling.

Whilst Europe endured the Dark Ages in the 6th & 7th Centuries, devotees of Shiva and Vishnu in Southern India were creating the Bhakti Movement. Some of these exponents, as in our volume, were bestowed with the title of saint but some had the additional title of sant, swami or goswami. Broadly speaking, Bhakti poetry, as in Hinduism itself, is divided into ‘Nirguna’, the idea that the divine is formless as exampled by Kabir and ‘Saguna’, which interprets the divine as having physical form as captured by Mirabai.

Our quoted authority is not the people in white coats but those with a quill, a heart and a soul that can take these feelings of love and loss and with the ink of words put to verse feelings and emotions that can be re-lived and shared by all. As they venture through depression, war, slavery to heartache and the loss of loved ones our eyes may mist and tears gently fall at what collectively we have done, have experienced, have witnessed and lost.

Bloomsbury presents Grilled by Leah Garcés, read by Laurel Lefkow. An animal activist's journey to the "other side" Joanna Lumley This is the story of what happens when we cross enemy lines to look for solutions. Leah Garcés has dedicated her career to fighting for the rights of the animals...

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. Human beings are, in the main, social animals, they like to gather, to herd together, to share experiences. But some do not. Either through choice or exclusion their way forward is difficult. In this volume our authors and their characters share their stories.

Sadness can be about so many things from places to people, from thoughts to actions. Our classic authors including Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, Ivan Turgenev and many others use their pens and stories to demonstrate the many ways this feeling can take a hold of lives and its consequences.

Sal Prentiss, orphaned and burdened with a terrible secret, just wants a place to belong. Sal lives with his uncles on a desolate ranch in the hills and finds himself at the centre of a brutal murder mystery when he discovers the body of his maths teacher, charred almost beyond recognition, half a mile from his uncles' compound.